


Save Yourself And Let Me Drown

by Anonymous



Category: Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Genre: First Kiss, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Nazis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-19 12:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22844590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He would be careful. He knew how to be careful. He knew how to dodge raids, play straight and narrow, subdue himself or laugh off rumours with a bold enough chuckle that nobody could accuse him of hypocrisy. Finkel was handsome - pretty, even - but he had been surrounded by pretty boys in the early days of the war, and he had held himself in check. A goddamn paragon of impeccable behaviour.He had been sloppy.
Relationships: Freddy Finkel/Captain Klenzendorf
Comments: 12
Kudos: 242
Collections: Anon Works





	Save Yourself And Let Me Drown

The boy - well, K called him a boy, though in several years even calling him a young man might be a stretch - because K felt disappointingly old, and palpably older still with every month that passed. K also called him a boy because all the young men had marched dutifully and proudly to the front line, and gotten themselves captured, or shot, or captured and then shot. If K thought of Finkel as a boy, like the other _jugend_ , then perhaps he might survive the war; it was a protective descriptor, then, something totemic and unfashionably pagan.

The boy, Finkel - K was going somewhere with this - could hardly be described as smart. He was well-meaning, of course, bullheadedly noble, eager to follow orders, to the best of his limited ability. The kind of soldier who would have thrown himself on a grenade to protect a superior without a second thought, and died before the war was three months old. It was luck, then, that kept him at K’s side. He was organised, to his credit: he kept the boys’ register neatly checked, the office cupboards and drawers tidy and prim; it was when orders lacked clarity that he became confused, going out on a limb to complete a task he had no idea how to see through. He had no common sense, then. That was the kindest way to put it.

All this was a roundabout way, of course, to say that K had been awfully besotted with him for months and the boy had no goddamn clue. Oh, it was frustrating, no doubt, but it was a relief more than anything. To push his advances to the edge of civility - of _legality_ \- and have the boy just smile and salute, pleased to be given the attention of a superior. 

It could have been anyone, K insisted to himself. A word of middling praise from a Major would send the boy into a tizzy for the afternoon; hell, the barest glance from a Colonel would probably make him cream his trousers. 

K amused himself: in truth, it was a form of self-defence. 

If the boy caught even the slightest whiff of his designs—

Well, he would deserve it, at any rate.

As it stood, he’d invited Finkel to dinner four times by now, and instead of a side-long glance and murmurs of inappropriate behaviour, the boy’s eyes had gone wide and his mouth slack and he’d happily agreed, every time as emphatically as the first. 

*

K’s apartment was small for one man and abysmal for two. They seemed stuck to the walls, edging around sideboards, the blackened fireplace, and the old armchair, inherited from whomever had occupied the room for decades before it was commandeered for the war effort. He was used to tipping a rationed tin of meat - mysterious - and vegetables - grey - into a saucepan for his evening meal, and tried, for Finkel, to make a sort of gravy from water and flour, so that the slop might more resemble a stew. Bread had not been portioned out to them for weeks now, so he had only hard biscuits as accompaniment. 

Finkel ate so gratefully that K felt bad. He wished he had more to give. He loved to see the shine of the boy’s eyes when he was this pleased; it made him believe the boy would be prone to tears when happy. 

He chastised himself, without much force, for thinking about it. 

He had only cheap wine to offer Finkel: two abandoned bottles of Riesling in a low kitchen cupboard, unopened since the mid-30s, dusty-necked and likely corked. He thought himself distasteful, to pour them both wine; it seemed overly familiar, too close to romantic. K yearned for vodka, though it was frowned upon to crave anything Russian-made these days. His hip flask held only schnapps, confiscated from outlying farms, though it was badly brewed and he thinned it with water to make it last longer. 

The first dinner had been near silent; the second one-sided. Finkel seemed unsure or unwilling to speak to his superior casually, even, as K joked, when they were off the clock. By the third, he’d begun to speak when spoken to, to answer K’s nudging questions about his habits, his interests, his life before the war. Tonight, he spooned his stew happily in great mouthfuls between sentences: having been given permission to speak, it seemed, he was not wont to stop. 

“My Grandmama made a stew just like this,” he was saying now, and K scoffed mildly; the boy far over-flattered his makeshift cooking. “My sister and I laid down rabbit traps in the spring, and we would run all over the farm until we couldn’t carry any more! We would watch how fast my Grandmama skinned them all, and then they would braise for hours and hours until the whole homestead smelled of stewing meat, and while it cooked she would make us sweet marzipan that we might have if we were good children and emptied our bowls at dinner.

“Ah,” he corrected himself abruptly. “Of course, beef is just as good as rabbit!”

K was not sure if his stew even contained beef. All the tins looked and smelled the same. 

His childhood had an idyllic sound to it. Finkel - _Freddy,_ he had insisted shyly, and K was too charmed - had been born in the boom after the Great War, and though life was hard, hope was high. He was a countryside boy, and thought this backwater town ever so cosmopolitan because he had never ventured closer to a city. K did not share his own anecdotes from that particular decade, as he had been living mostly underground and keeping to himself. 

This, of course, was a euphemism. 

He had fucked a lot in the 20s. 

Not that it did him any good to think of it now.

It was safer to speak of the present, so he gave his observations on the state of the war - sugar-coated - and on the progress of the _jugend_ , punctuated with great sighs and sips of his wine.

“You like the Betzler boy, though?” Finkel said, and he did not sound entirely happy about it.

K let out a rough laugh through his nose. “Little Herr Hand Grenade. We are both casualties of war.” His deadened eye prickled, and he stopped himself from rubbing at it.

“His mother is very rude to you,” Finkel huffed.

“She is very brave,” K muttered, and Finkel cocked his head curiously.

“Raising the boy on her own?”

K, who knew something of Mrs Betzler’s extra-curricular proclivities, shrugged loosely, said, “That also,” and did not elaborate. 

They were quiet for a moment after that. Not the awkward silence of their first date - their first _dinner_ , K thought sternly - but both of them thoughtful. 

It was then K noticed that his ankle—

Both of them had their boots off, of course, a modicum of comfort in K’s temporary home, military-issue socks in varying states of distress; K’s ankle, under the tiny wooden table, had fallen gently limp against Finkel’s. Nothing of their skin was touching. Just their woolen socks. But K did not know when it had happened or how long they had been touching. If it had only been a second or two, well, retracting his leg would be no cause for concern. A simple brush, an invasion of personal space he could be apologetic for and then brush aside. But what if it had been minutes? What if, as soon as they had sat down, his legs had tangled unconsciously with Finkel’s like silly teenager lovers yearning for some affection away from prying eyes?

Then - _then -_ he could not possibly retreat from such a tryst without Finkel noticing. Movement would draw attention to the thing, to the fact it was, in all, wildly inappropriate. Flirting in roundabout terms, playing word games with the boy that he was not quite sharp enough to pick up on, this was all well and good, but physicality, a touch, unasked for and unconsciously offered: this was dangerously telling.

K, a very cool exterior, ate a potato from his stew and chewed on it as if he were thinking of something very deep and important. Then, with a cough, he slid aside in his chair, taking both legs out from under the table and crossing them, as though he had simply been waiting for a lull in the conversation to sit more comfortably.

Immediately, as if chastened, Finkel retreated into his chair, his whole body seizing up. Legs under his chair, elbows drawn in, head down. He flushed very quickly. 

K did not say anything to ease his chagrin. To do so would be damning. 

“Would you like more wine?” he said instead, talking too quickly.

“Yes, please, sir, thank you, sir,” Finkel rushed to respond, almost before he’d finished asking.

K’s chair squawked horribly as he shoved it back to stand. The wine was in the kitchen. The kitchen was barely three steps away. But he could not go. He could not move.

Finkel’s hand had shot out to hold his wrist. 

He seemed as shocked at his own audacity as K was. “Sub-officer,” K said to him coldly. Safety, he thought, safety was the priority here. Nothing as yet to incriminate him, merely a series of minor blunders. If this was Finkel’s idea of an accusation, it proved he was unsure enough not to voice it. 

“Captain,” Finkel breathed, staring at his own hand like it was possessed. 

“Shall I get that wine, Sub-officer Finkel?” K said, slowly and carefully.

Finkel held on a moment longer. And then, all five fingers at once, his hand sprung free, leaving the faintest white echo on K’s skin for a moment, fading fast. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

K took their glasses into the kitchen. Breathing steadily through his nose, he found the wine, poured it, cleaned up the smallest spill from where his hand was shaking on the neck of the bottle. He put his hands in his pockets for a second to quell them. His voice was sturdier than his palms, and he called back, “I have a tin of pears here as well, if you fancy?”

“Oh, lovely, yes please,” Finkel answered, sounding very thin.

That was more to occupy his hands. Tin-opener on the lid, twist, pull; find two bowls; two half pears apiece in their gelatinous syrup. 

He would be careful. He knew how to be careful. He knew how to dodge raids, play straight and narrow, subdue himself or laugh off rumours with a bold enough chuckle that nobody could accuse him of hypocrisy. Finkel was handsome - pretty, even - but he had been surrounded by pretty boys in the early days of the war, and he had held himself in check. A goddamn paragon of impeccable behaviour.

He had been sloppy.

K settled his expression, nicely neutral, and took the wine and bowls back to the table. He did not dare joke a flourish as he set them down. Work was the safest topic of discussion, and he thought he would put them back on neutral ground with a reminder of Finkel’s tasks for the week ahead, and as he sat—

When he sat, though, Finkel suddenly jerked upright, almost to military attention. His arm flinched as though he needed to salute, but he managed to keep it at his side. Instead, he stood, ramrod still, staring at the wall just behind K’s head.

“Something on your mind, Sub-officer?” K said, very low, taking a bite of his watery pear.

Finkel swallowed. He would not dare, K thought. He could not dare denounce a superior officer without sufficient cause. 

“Sir—” Finkel stammered. He was pink, cheek to cheek, right across the bridge of his nose. “Sir, I—I’m afraid to be blunt—”

“Out with it,” K barked. He refused to make this easy for the boy.

“Sir—Captain K, sir—”

“Address me properly, boy.”

“C-Captain Klenzendorf,” Finkel managed, and his head dropped, his eyes steadfastly stuck on the pitiful bowl of pears below him. “Captain. Please don’t—please forgive me if—I’m being— _forward—”_

“Out with it!”

“Sir, yes sir!” Finkel shouted back, military instinct kicking in, his arm finally coming up to his forehead in a wobbly salute. “Please don’t ask me to leave, sir!”

K—didn’t know what he meant by it. Not at all. “Explain yourself.”

“I’m sorry I grabbed your wrist, sir! It was too forward, and I—I had made myself too comfortable, it was too familiar, I’m truly very sorry, sir, and I don’t want it to come between us!”

K stared at him. “...Explain yourself,” he said again, a little softer.

Finkel looked at a loss. “Sir?”

“—What is happening here?” K asked, far more openly than he’d intended.

Finkel swallowed, and then apparently taking that as a direct order, said very, very hesitantly, “What is happening is that I—I was overly familiar with my superior officer, in—in a way that is—not—befitting? Not befitting a man of my—of my station, or, no, any man at all, that’s it. Any man. I should not have—touched you. In such a way.”

K’s fist was balled against his thigh under the table. His bad eye was prickling again, almost fizzing, an unsettling sensation that he wished he could swat away like a fly. “In what way?” he managed.

Finkel looked at him, finally, and he had the expression of a young dog that has been chastised, too brutally, without its understanding why. “A—Affectionately,” he whispered. 

K did not stand. He wanted to, but he couldn’t reliably move. His body refused. It had shut down in abject self-preservation, tense all over, all of his muscles ready to spring at the first sign of danger. It served to draw out the silence between them far longer than he wanted it to be.

Finkel took in a shallow breath, as though he intended to speak. He did this twice more, without a word. And then he said, “I should go.”

“No,” K said at once.

“Sir?”

“No, please don’t leave,” K said, desperate. He hated how desperate he sounded. Finkel clearly hadn’t a clue how to react to it. 

K forced himself to move. He forced himself to stand. He was barely an inch taller than Finkel, and shorter than him when his posture was bad. He was not an intimidating man, aside from the fact of his rank and the gory horror of his eye, but Finkel seemed, nonetheless, intimidated.

“Don’t go,” K said again. 

The table was so small he could travel its circumference in two long strides. 

Really, the apartment was too small for two grown men.

That’s what went through his head as he reached out, and took Finkel’s jaw in his palm, and leaned a little forward, and kissed him.

Their mouths were still against each other. The room was still and silent. Outside, long after curfew, the world was too still and too silent.

Finkel grabbed K’s wrist for the second time that night. 

“Oh,” K said blandly. Their lips were not touching anymore. “Oh. I’m terribly sorry.”

“No,” Finkel whispered, and K thought for a second, yes, that sounds right, my apology should not be accepted, he is quite correct—

It was nothing for Finkel to lean in and kiss him again. The apartment was so small, after all. 

K’s mouth opened under him.

He had not kissed in a very long time; his body still remembered what to do. He had no clue whether Finkel had spent his handsome youth chasing girls through the cornfields, peppering them with kisses, taking his favourites back to the family barn where the haystacks were warm and dry and hid a great number of sins—

He had no clue, but Finkel, too, knew how to kiss. His lips were curious and very soon wet. Both of his hands were circling K’s wrists. When had K brought his other palm up to cup Finkel’s jaw? When had he tilted the boy’s head to kiss him deeper, to taste him more openly? His hands on Finkel’s jaw, Finkel’s fingers around his wrists; K’s mouth taking of Finkel’s, and vice versa, and both of them, both of them were kissing, both of them wanting—

“I’m sorry.” K had pulled back, and was angry at himself for stopping. Angry at Finkel for letting him stop. “I’m really very sorry.”

“Please,” the boy whimpered. “Please, don’t. Please don’t be sorry for this.”

“I’ve dragged you into this,” K was muttering, barely aware of his own rambling. “Dragged you down with me, I’ve coerced you, you see—”

“No—”

“Yes, I’ve coerced you, that’s what we’ll have to tell them, if anyone finds out, that’s what you’ll say—”

“I shan’t,” Finkel said, surprisingly firm. “Nobody will know.” 

And he kissed K again. That was the second kiss he had instigated. K had only started one. They were unequal, and K thought frantically that he would have to make up for lost ground.

One of Finkel’s thumbs was tracing back and forth over the fragile inside of his wrist, where K’s skin was paper-thin and most delicate. “Please don’t send me away,” he said, as miserable as K had ever heard him.

“I won’t have you waste those damn pears.”

Finkel paused, shocked, and then laughed, once, watery. Kissed K again, watery too. 

“You must not kiss me again before I have the chance to kiss you,” K told him firmly. His whole chest seemed to have collapsed with relief, his heart sitting in his stomach and not entirely unpleasantly.

“No, sir, of course, sir,” Finkel replied, his beautiful eagerness all present and correct once more.

*

Well, K thought, carding his fingers softly through Finkel’s hair as the boy slept, he had turned out to be a far poorer judge of character than he’d thought.

The boy was not slow; and K had not thought himself capable of running into the path of a bullet again. He’d lost an eye before.

He stood to lose so very much. 

—Even so.


End file.
